Einstein's time of space and relative peace

It was the place where the celebrated genius went to escape the madding crowds. And for three glorious summers the modest wooden summerhouse in the lakeside village of Caputh, near Potsdam, provided Albert Einstein and his family with the perfect retreat.

Now the bulldozers are putting the finishing touches to the garden before it and the house are opened to the public next month for the rest of this year.

Then the summerhouse becomes a centre for seminars and lectures, in accordance with Einstein's wishes.

While it is open visitors will be able to see the simple study-bedroom where he wrote some of his most famous scientific papers, the roof terrace, with its sweeping views over the shimmering Lake Templin, and the enamel tub in which he bathed.

The opening is part of a year of celebrations in Germany marking the anniversaries of Einstein's theory of relativity, which he wrote in 1905, and his death in the US 50 years ago today.

Einstein is especially revered in Germany, the country of his birth, although he fled in 1933, never to return.

As part of the celebrations government ministries in Berlin, including the office of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, have been wrapped in giant Einstein quotations. A new biography is on Germany's best-seller list.

But it is probably the summerhouse, where Einstein lived between 1929 and December 1932, that offers the most revealing and intimate glimpse into his life.

Berlin had promised him a summerhouse as a 50th birthday present, but the plan was lost in wrangling about the cost, and Einstein ended up buying his own plot and commissioning Konrad Wachsmann, a young pupil of the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, to build him a spacious but simple home in Caputh.

There, largely hidden by pine forest, he managed to achieve the privacy that had so often eluded him. He had won the Nobel prize for physics in 1921 and was internationally famous.

"He liked to walk in the woods for hours. He came back with mushrooms that his housekeeper cooked," the curator of the house, Erika Britzke, said. "He played his violin. He sat on the roof terrace in the shade. And he sailed on the lake ... It was like a paradise for him."

Einstein shared the house with his wife, Elsa, his two stepdaughters, Margot and Ilsa, Ilsa's husband and a maid. He wrote letters and papers in his bedroom on an old typewriter.

Other physicists, including Max Planck, were frequent visitors, together with the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore and the author Heinrich Mann.

Less welcome were the tourists who would turn up in his garden.

According to his biographers he pursued several love affairs while he was in Caputh, often on board his sailing boat, Tümmler.

"Einstein really was the first pop idol in history," Frank Steiner, professor of theoretical physics at Ulm University, in the city where Einstein was born, said yesterday after touring the summerhouse.

"He really was the most important physicist since Newton. It wasn't just the physics. It was the whole of his vision."

He added: "People say that he didn't solve the problems he worked on in the last 20 years of his life, which is true. But he asked the right questions. People still haven't solved the unified theory he suggested.

"And we are still working on string theory. That comes from Einstein."

Einstein, a secular Jew, left Caputh a month before Hitler took power. The Nazis confiscated the house two years later.

Although it is not yet officially open, tourists are already wandering uninvited around the garden, much as they did 75 years ago.